Comment on Chicken vs Egg
PapaStevesy@midwest.social 1 month agoNo it wouldn’t. If we’re going to talk about the creation of chickens as happening at a single instance of egg-laying, the two progenitors of said first chicken would be proto-chickens whose DNA combined in the fertilized egg to make, for the first time ever, a chicken. Yes, it’s a chicken egg, because it contains a chicken, but it’s also a proto-chicken’s egg because it wasn’t laid by a full chicken. It couldn’t have been, they didn’t exist yet.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 month ago
There is no question as to the biology. The first egg that would hatch a chicken was laid by a proto-chicken. The genetic mutation that delineated chicken from proto-chicken first existed in that egg.
By your argument, the status of the egg is dependent on what it contains.
Suppose that proto-chicken pair laid an egg. And instead of it hatching into a chicken, I ate it. This egg never became a chicken; it was only an egg. It couldn’t be a chicken egg, because it never contained a chicken. It could only be a proto-chicken egg.
The egg that the chicken hatched from only became a chicken egg once there was a chicken inside it. The chicken egg, therefore, could not precede the chicken.
jaybone@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I can’t believe I’m actually reading this thread.
nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Discourse as old as time, song as old as rhyme, chicken or the egg.
PapaStevesy@midwest.social 1 month ago
No, if a chicken could hatch out of it, regardless of whether or not it actually did, it’s a chicken egg. Nothing else could hatch out of it and it didn’t somehow cease to have been an egg just because it doesn’t hatch.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 month ago
Correct. But, it was an egg laid by a proto-chicken; it is a proto-chicken egg.
Our proto-chicken couple also laid an egg that would have become a “Shicken”, if I hadn’t eaten it first. But, because there was never a “Shicken”, there could never be a “Shicken” egg; the egg was only a proto-chicken egg.
AnonStoleMyPants@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
No, the shicken egg was a shicken egg even prior to you eating it. The act of giving it a name is irrelevant. The proto-chicken could’ve lain a hundred eggs, each becoming a new “chicken”. If 99 of them die off and are never born then that does not mean they didn’t exist. It just means they did not exist in a way where we could’ve given them a name.